Carving in Snow

( Published in The Courier-Mail , 10 October, 2019) The great Australian sport is criticising the Grand Final pre-match entertainment. OneRepublic was caught offside before the NRL match, after Dean Lewis missed the mark at the AFL. Daryl Braithwaite and Paul Kelly saved the days. Arts criticism is alive and well. On AFL Grand Final day, I played my own grand final. The whistle blew on my fifth and final Brisbane Festival. It’s been a privilege to be captain of the team, and to curate 3,000 performances and 30 world premieres from 7,000 artists. This year, we broke our box office record for the third year running, topping $4m. More than 1.2 million people turned up, many of them tourists.   But hey, arts and sport aren’t in competition. We can be passionate about both, and on the same day. In fact, people encounter the arts more than sport, mostly without knowing it. Every time you mouth the words to a song in a supermarket, or are attracted to an image o...

The attack in Orlando was a gay hate crime. The Prime Minister today initially omitted this fact from his expression of sympathy. He later changed his language , calling the mass shooting “an attack on the gay community and an attack on all of us - on all our freedoms, the freedom to gather together, to celebrate, to share time with friends.” He went on to say that there “are people outside our country, and some within it, who hate the freedoms that we enjoy and would seek to threaten them and undermine them with violence... Together, at home and abroad, we continue the fight against terrorism and stand up for the values of our free nations.” There seems to be no acknowledgment of the glaring irony. What are these “freedoms that we enjoy”? Certainly not the freedom to marry. For that, we must argue the case during a plebiscite that is sure to unleash homophobic hate. It's difficult to feel that it's "an attack on all of us" when the LGBTQ community ar...